“Night” was written in 1980 by a good friend of mine. I have mentioned him before in earlier posts as TR. (Tom Robinson). This is a great song from the past. I loved playing this in our group or as a duo with TR. I love the rhythm and intro motif.

The subject of the lyrics are familiar to me. Driving at night. Getting away. Pondering life and eventual death in the dead of the night are right up my alley!

I recorded the guitar track and wrote the MIDI drum parts to fit the groove and the opening motif. Then I re-recorded the guitar and added bass guitar from computer modules. Then it was time to add vocals and do the mix. I hope you enjoy this gem.

“Night” (C) 1980 Tom Rominson

Night is a ride you just get in a car and go cruisin on. On past the light of the city lights to the cool dark air. Night is a plunge into twinkling depths that can still your mind. Washing your wounds in nature’s rain, her fountains everywhere.

So let the magic continue while you search for an answer within you. And see that swiftly you fly. ‘ ‘Cause we always knew you had to die sometime.

Taking a life is a crime and you know you’re the victim everyday. They gave you a name and a story, not they’re showing you the way. Day is a desert of calendar deadlines, your life an empty phrase. London Bridges falling down, and the rent you got to pay.

But they can’t poison your fantasy in this refuge from insanity. You’ll be here till you kill the lie. And we all know you’re gonna die sometime.

Night is a ride you just get in the car and go cruisin’ on. On past the light of the city lights to the cool dark air. Night is a plunge into twinkling depths that can still your mind. Washing your wounds in nature’s rain, her fountains everywhere.

And when the story is over you will sleep in fields of clover. But your dreams will keep the night-time sky. ‘Cause we always knew you had to die sometime.

On-street-parking. I know I will get a lot of kick-back for this one but I think we should end on-street-parking. Even in residential and business districts. Safety issues, snow clearance, traffic flow, and maintenance costs come to mind immediately. I know many areas do not have much parking space for residents and there are more multiple car families than in the past. Businesses also benefit if customers can park right in front of their stores. But I am not sure this is worth blocking local traffic including emergency vehicles, utility companies, snow plows and the like in areas easily affected by weather, accidents, building fires and a host of other challenges.

Still, if we are planning a city or community, let’s plan on eliminating this practice entirely. Just think how much this would ease congestion, improve safety, reduce city road maintenance costs, allow for emergency vehicles and unexpected weather or unusual events and improve the look and health of our streets and neighborhoods.

Let me know what you think. What would you suggest to your city planners?

Here are two little things that bug me about traffic patterns and planning. Maybe it is just me, but if I am driving in residential or even business areas where there are a lot of intersections, I think it is weird and dangerous when you come to an intersection but the traffic coming from a dead-end street does not have to stop. This seems to happen a lot where a main road ends in cul de sacs where the “dead-end” is only one block long. Not much traffic comes from there and it is easy to miss the fact that on-coming traffic has no stop sign.

The second minor thing is when you have multiple lanes of road or entry ramps to a highway where the lanes merge and signs say the left lane ends! Again this does not make logical sense. Merging traffic in the US comes in from the right lane the vast majority of the time. The right lane is the slow or merge/exit lane. Faster traffic is encouraged to use the left lanes, implying they have priority. Why tell a priority lane that the lane ends…… merge into the right lane……. and sometimes when you reach the end of the entry ramp you have to merge left again? These little things just bug me from time to time.

I like to drive around cities and country sides. It becomes obvious after a bit of traveling that some cities are better planned and have more logical systems in place than others. I would love to have the ear of some city planners because it is clear they do not PLAN for growth and other transportation needs early enough. I would like to share some of my thoughts with you, and hopefully you will share yours here as well. Who knows, maybe we can get the attention of a few city planners while we are it!

One thing I would really like to see changed is the location of many schools. I know there are good reasons, but all too often they are located on the main strip through towns of all sizes. I thought about posting pictures as examples, but we have all seen them. My guess is this makes the land rather expensive for all tax payers. Or to look at it another way, the land is of commercial value and interest to local businesses. A number of businesses could pay fair price for the prime locations and exposure the real estate could provide and that would translate to higher tax collected and business success in the area.

Now consider if the schools would be located a few blocks away from “the main drag” going through town. Your children will be safer crossing the streets and playing in the area due to reduced traffic around the school. People that are not supposed to be there would be more obvious if they are loitering around the area. This would reduce risk to students.

Now that the school is not on the main road, traffic flow will be improved by not restricting speeds in school zones, reducing congestion in parts of town most people will have to travel through daily or at least quite often. I understand this might mean a loss of revenue by reducing speeding violations through school zones, but I think we can live with that!

What do you think? Do you see more reasons to adopt this policy? Do you think there are reasons or situations where this would not be beneficial?

Let me know what bothers you about travel through your city and in other locations. Who knows, maybe we can suggest changes that will help a lot of people.

**This is MidiMike’s daughter. I help my dad out with his blog. I wanted to tell all of you that this is, by far, my favorite song that my dad has ever written. If you stop to listen to any of the original tunes, I would highly recommend this one!! Thanks.**

And now a message from my dad:

On most of my tunes, I play all the instruments and sequence the drums and other sound effects. I usually sing lead or I have my wife take the vocal lead. Once I started working in music stores selling instruments and sound equipment, I asked friends (and customers at the time!) to come over and lay down guitar solos or I might have a guest vocalist. What I do at Night was one that we did ourselves. I play all guitar parts and the back up vocals. I think at this time I had graduated from a Yamaha MT4X (I think they were called and this was a 4 Track double speed cassette recorder) to the Alesis ADAT. So now I had an amazing 8 tracks to record on! Actually I needed one track to record the SMPTE time code so the Alesis ADAT would sync up to the computer (now I actually have a PC and put the Atari in deep storage). I can go into this details on this system for a later post when I am feeling nostalgic, but it allowed unlimited MIDI tracks on the PC or Atari and connect to the playback of the ADAT.

The song itself reflects my thoughts on a number of topics. I really like to drive. I don’t have a fast or luxury car. I just like to drive. When I have some free time or just want to think, I often find myself cruising the local country side. I would listen to music while driving and that sometimes adds to the frustration. Most of the music you hear on commercial radio is garbage or re-packaged songs and ideas I have heard for the last few decades. Like a lot of us struggling artists and performers, we see a bunch of bands with lots of air-play and they are just so-so. OK music, but nothing special. As a songwriter, I get so tired of the same theme or idea in every song on the radio and they seem to get played non-stop.

One line reflects this fairly well…. ” so I turn the radio over to the right, playing the same songs as the other night”. Originally titled – “Rainy Day”, What I do at Night has become one of my favorite driving songs. Enjoy.